odfdo

Python library for OpenDocument format (ODF)

odfdo is a Python3 library implementing the ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument Format standard.

Project: https://github.com/jdum/odfdo

Author: jerome.dumonteil@gmail.com

License: Apache License, Version 2.0

odfdo is a derivative work of the former lpod-python project.

Installation

Installation from Pypi (recommended):

pip install odfdo

Installation from sources (requiring setuptools):

pip install .

After installation from sources, you can check everything is working (some requirements: pytest, Pillow, ...):

pytest

The tests should run for a few seconds or minutes and issue no error.

The full test suite uses tox to check different Python and lxml versions.

A special effort is made to limit the dependencies of this library: the only dependency (outside development) is lxml. The lxml versions depend mainly on the version of Python used, see the pyproject.toml file for details.

Usage

from odfdo import Document, Paragraph

doc = Document('text')
doc.body.append(Paragraph("Hello world!"))
doc.save("hello.odt")

tl;dr

'Intended Audience :: Developers'

Documentation

There is no detailed documentation or tutorial, but:

• the recipes folder contains more than 60 working sample scripts,
• the doc folder contains an auto generated HTML documentation, including recipes.

When installing odfdo, a few scripts are installed:

• odfdo-diff: show a diff between two .odt document.
• odfdo-folder: convert standard ODF file to folder and files, and reverse.
• odfdo-show: dump text from an ODF file to the standard output, and optionally styles and meta informations.
• odfdo-styles: command line interface tool to manipulate styles of ODF files.
• odfdo-replace: find a pattern (regex) in an ODF file and replace by some string.
• odfdo-userfield: show or set the user-field content in an ODF file.
• odfdo-highlight: highlight the text matching a pattern (regex) in an ODF file.
• odfdo-headers: print the headers of an ODF file.
• odfdo-table-shrink: shrink tables to optimize width and height.
• odfdo-to-md: export text document in markdown format to stdout (experimental).

About styles: the best way to apply style is by merging styles from a template document into your generated document (See odfdo-styles script). Styles are a complex matter in ODF, so trying to generate styles programmatically is not recommended.

Limitations

odfdo is intended to facilitate the generation of ODF documents, nevertheless a basic knowledge of the ODF format is necessary.

ODF document rendering can vary greatly from software to software. Especially the "styles" of the document allow an adaptation of the rendering for a particular software.

The best (only ?) way to apply style is by merging styles from a template document into your generated document. However a few recipes show how to make programmatically some basic styles: create_basic_text_styles, add_text_span_styles).

Related project

I you work on .ods files (spreadsheet), you may be interested by these scripts using this library to parse/generate .ods files: https://github.com/jdum/odsgenerator and https://github.com/jdum/odsparsator

Changes from former lpod library

lpod-python was written in 2009-2010 as a Python 2.x library, see: https://github.com/lpod/lpod-python

odfdo is an adaptation of this former project. odfdo main changes from lpod:

• odfdo requires Python version 3.9 to 3.13. For previous Python versions see older releases.
• API change: more pythonic.
• include recipes.
• use Apache 2.0 license.